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WHITE PRIVILEGE and WHITE GUILT 1 an Analysis Of WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 1 An Analysis of “White Privilege and White Guilt” Simone Kirwan Faculty of Education University of Manitoba WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 2 Introduction In the recent sociological literature, there is increasing interest in ‘white privilege’ and ‘white guilt’. Both these concepts have affected me personally and professionally. Thus, when I began reading about white privilege, I became very interested in this idea. However, I was not completed satisfied with the work I was reading because it pertains to how whites or mainstream peoples gain privilege within a North American context. Clearly, as a reasonably well-educated, middle class person who happens to be female and who is also considered to be ‘of colour’ or of ‘visible minority status’, this has not been my experience. I then pondered the reactions of many middle class, mainstream (read: white) people that I have met who strive to be sensitive to the plight of others, politically correct and culturally sensitive, and who profess to being colour-blind, racially tolerant, and/or aware of issues of marginalization and privilege. In countless encounters that I have had with these people over many years, I think I have found well-meaning people to be clumsy, awkward, and sometimes expressing guilt or shame for the ‘supposed’ privilege and status that their skin colour affords them and the historical oppression against the ‘coloured people’ perpetuated by their putative ancestors. Thus, with this experience, I want to focus on the idea of white guilt but I wish to balance it with that of white privilege. White Privilege and White Guilt In order to truly understand the meaning of a sociological concept, one must first provide an operational definition of it. This helps to eliminate confusion and helps keep people on the same page, so to speak. In order to determine the meaning of white WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 3 privilege, I sought out the work of Peggy McIntosh, author of “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1988). In this piece, McIntosh (1988) describes white privilege as “those conditions which [she] think[s ] …attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location” (p. 178). In other words, white privilege is an innate collection of favoured benefits or circumstances which are not earned, that have been granted to white people, who are often considered to be ‘the mainstream’ in Canada and the U.S. Thus, one is born into white privilege based on the colour of one’s skin and for no other apparent reason. This is sometimes termed ascribed status, that is, a standing that is innately assigned or attributed to an individual, and it can be contrasted with achieved status, which is a position that has been earned or deserved based on actions of the individual. White privilege may be contrasted with the notion of white guilt. According to Shelby Steele (2006), who wrote White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, white guilt is: the vacuum of moral authority that comes from simply knowing that one’s race is associated with racism. Whites (and American institutions [and Canadian institutions, too]) must acknowledge historical racism to show themselves redeemed of it (p. 24). Thus, some white people who are apprised of their experiences of white privilege may feel badly about the intrinsic benefits they perceive that they obtain simply because they are ‘white’, and, to compensate for this, they are overly sensitive, extremely aware, or excessively tolerant toward non-whites. I, therefore, understand white guilt to be a phenomenon that although real, may not be the most effective way to counterbalance the WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 4 historical effects of racism perpetuated by the mainstream against those deemed to be ‘coloured’. Historical Perspectives on White Privilege and White Guilt In searching for the historical roots of white privilege, I found that the notion of white privilege can be traced back to the work of W.E.B. DuBois. Dubois was an African American writer and scholar, who wrote in his book Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880: [i]t must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 5 On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor (pp. 700-701). Clearly, DuBois shows that white privilege existed even between the poor whites and poor blacks. John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev (1996) two outspoken advocates of white privilege state that: [r]ace is inscribed in every issue of the day; indeed politics in the U.S. consists of a dispute over how to deal with the ‘violent’ black male and the ‘immoral’ black female. From the other side, every challenge to the prerogatives of whiteness is a call for the abolition of the ‘white race’… [in order] to focus on whiteness and the struggle to abolish the white race from within (p. 2). Thus, the desire to rid the world of white privilege is evident, both in the distant and recent past. For my purposes, I argue that although Canada is obviously different from the USA, it too has had historical cases of white privilege and racism. Examples of this include the Chinese Canadians who worked to build the CPR and were not recognized at the time for their contributions, the Japanese-Canadian internment camps which during the Second World War confined people of Japanese descent, driving them out of their homes and forcibly removing their right to property, and the numerous traumas that were imposed on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples. WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 6 Of course, not everyone who was non-white has suffered terrible trauma, loss of status, or threat as a result of racism and prejudice. However, non-white people were often undervalued and not deemed to be equal to whites until recently. In fact, recently there has been a movement of Caucasian peoples to assuage their feelings of guilt due to the innate privileges believed to be associated with being white. This is the idea of white guilt. In searching for historical perspectives on white guilt, I discovered the work of Roberts (2008), who argues that: [t]he topics of racism, slavery, and colonialism are the subjects in which most white students are made to feel a sense of guilt and most black students a sense of victimhood. … [Moreover, t]he subject of the transatlantic slave trade is constantly used to reinforce white guilt and promote a sense of historical injustice and victim status among blacks (p. 26). Thus, Roberts says that Caucasian students, and probably Caucasians, in general, are made to feel guilty about the history perpetrated by whites against blacks and people of African descent. Consequently, whites are victimized by people who use this historical perspective. Even students who have had no ancestors who perpetuated any harm to blacks (for example, students from very low socioeconomic status) are made to feel guild about what whites, in general, have done. In this respect, Grooms (2009), notes that: [i]n an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery “a moral and political evil.” Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. WHITE PRIVILEGE AND WHITE GUILT 7 The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states. Clearly, Grooms informs his readers about two important facts: 1) Some Americans of European descent felt badly about the slave trade of African peoples to the new world, and even publically said so, and 2) In the 1860s, there were some free blacks who owned black slaves. By looking at these two perspectives which point to history where Africans were forcibly taken from their homes and transported to North and South America as slaves, one is tempted to believe that white guilt has resulted from educated people feeling badly about what happened in the past and from the legacies of slavery, racism, and prejudice have left on black people, especially in the United States.
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